Eighteenth-century breast cancer was a nightmarish, greatly feared disease. As a disease, cancer horrified people so much because of its slow and usually extremely painful progress towards a torturous death. Cancer in the breast was considered the most common of cancers and the most dangerous: it seemed to kill with frightening certainty. Since antiquity, it had been thought that breast cancer was cancer per se; the breast was considered the most common location of cancer: an anonymous author wrote that when ‘[o]ne has a Cancer in any part besides, Twenty have them in their Breasts’. Eighteenth-century authors have left us many suggestions relating to how common they thought the disease to be: it was considered ‘frequent’, and a surgeon further corroborated that ‘[i]f it were necessary, I could give an almost incredible Number of Instances, where such Circumstances have ensued’. Some considered London specifically. It was thought that breast cancer was common in London: ‘in this over-grown metropolis there are great number affected in the same manner’, and another surgeon testified that ‘[i]n London I have been consulted in many hundred cases’.

While common, and even though cancer was in theory considered usually incurable, physicians, surgeons and other healers tried desperately to understand cancer and eagerly tested new medicines, and surgeons radically improved their operating techniques. Cancer was and had been a metaphor of many evils since ancient times, used to describe nearly anything seriously damaging, various phenomena that ate something alive.